You might have lots of pages on your site but only 7 will be used for the seven sliding menus.You need to tell WordPress which 7 pages you want to use.

You do this by setting up a special menu with 7 items in it in the WordPress dashboard under "appearance- menus". Create your own menu, call it whatever you want, and select the " sliding navigation" option.

If your site doesn't yet have any pages, the sliders are set to point to some preset links just so that they work.

So the first step is that you need to make 7 pages on your wordpress site. You can give them a featured image straight away, or you can come back and do it later.

An alternative explanation Some people find it hard to follow the instructions above.Here is an alternative explanation by a user called Carlos:

1) have regular menu for the main menu and give it a name2) create a menu with 7 options (select your favorites for the main menu3) select the main menu with the first menu4) select the sliding menu with the second one.5) Upload the 7 photos to the library6) go page my page and in the right size of the editing page click set select figure photo or imageand repeat step 7 for each page that are going to be presented by the sliding navigation menu. Great!!!

Here is another explanation by me:

Each of the sliders represents a page on your site. You need to create seven pages, one for each slider.The actual pictures that are in the sliding menus need to be uploaded using the ' featured image', one for each of the seven pages.Then you need to create a menu (Appearance-Menus) with those seven pages and choose the "sliding navigation" option for that menu so that WordPress knows to use these seven pages for your sliding doors.

How do I link to something other than one of these 7 pages?

By default the seven sliding doors link to any seven pages in your blog. You can link them to other pages though using a plugin called "page-links-to" plugin.

The theme should prompt you to install this plug-in.

This adds the "page links to" option box at the bottom of each page, where you can enter any URL that you want the slider to point to.

1. Install the 'page links to' plugin.

2. Use the 'page links to' plugin to point your page to anywhere!

How do I link to a category in the sliding doors and select an image for that category?

There's no way to pick up category images, so you need to load the image you want to a page, then use page links plugin to point that page to the category.

To link a slider to a category just treat it as if you were linking to an outside page. (1) Make sure the slider has a page.(2) Upload the image you want for the category as the featured image for that page. (3) In the 'page-links-to' entry type the category URL.

To get the category url, go to the category and copy the URL from your browser.

To change the order of the sliding door images, you have to go to menus on your admin page. On the right side, underneath your menu name you will have your pages in the order they were created (assuming you added the pages to the menu). Each page will be listed in its own box. You can actually click and hold on a box and drag it above or below other boxes. So put these boxes in the same order you have your pages and VOILA! When you save your menu and go to your website you will see your images in the order you want.

Help my sliders don't slide anymore!

Try disabling your plugins. The sliders won't stop working by themselves. Usually in the process of customising the theme or adding plugins something is broken, so just reverse back through what you've done, and be sure to make a backup of the theme files BEFORE you make any changes!

Firstly read this post about child themes:[url]http://www.mac-host.com/support/viewtopic.php?f=9&t=1869[/url]Pretty much everything to do with the appearance of the sliding door theme (except for the images themselves) is controlled by the CSS file. It's called style.css and it is a text file with lots of entries that look something like this:

The code snippet above means that in the 'body' of the page, the dafault text color is #fff which is white. The background color is #000 which is black and so on.

The styling of the sliding menus is in the imageMenu.CSS file.

The styling for the rest of the theme is in the style.CSS file.

You can just go and edit the CSS file by hand, then look at the results in a browser, but I wouldn't recommend that, because it can be hard working out which bits of the CSS file correspond to which bits of the page. If you want to change things like font size and font colour you really need to start to learn your way around CSS. There are a couple of good ways to do this.

1. Get a program like CSSedit.CSS Edit is easy to use. You just open the site URL with CSS edit, and click on whatever it is that you want to change. CSS edit will then show you which part of the CSS file you need to change, and it will even give you some options in a little toolbar. Check out the CSS edit page for more details.

How do I change the home page to be just a home page and not my latest blog entries

This is a wordpress question, you can find the answer at wordpress.org, but basically, in the back end go to Settings - Reading and the first option is Front Page Displays... Change it from Your Latest Posts to A Static Page.

I made some changes and now it looks really bad in Internet Explorer, but it looks OK in Safari and Firefox.

Windows Explorer has many bugs in it.

Basically you can design something to look good on any other browser, and it will look good on all the other browsers, but Windows Explorer looks different.

Lots of web designers have to design things twice, once for windows explorer, and once for all the other browsers. There are often separate css files and pieces of code to deal with the bugs in explorer.

The bottom line is, if you go changing things in a theme, you need to check the results on on non-Explorer browser (eg Safari or Firefox etc) and Explorer. Do this as you go, not at the end.

If you design on Explorer alone, it might look bad on all the other browsers.If you design on another browser alone, it may (probably will) look bad in explorer.

So best to have a mac and a PC going together and check it on both as you go.

How do I change the background of the sliding images?

You have to go into the imagemenu.css style sheet, and find 'background-color'.

How do I change the text heading at the top of my site to a custom image?

How do I make the sliding images work on all the pages, not just the front page?

By default the sliding image menu only works on the front page and the category page. There is a line in the header.php file that does this, and you can remove the line to make the sliding images appear on every page. Read this thread to find out how to do this.

I have changed images at the top of the page but I am still seeing the old images.

This is a very common problem, it's a proxy or cache issue on your server. The new image is uploaded, but your computer is displaying the old one. Three ways to fix it: (1) Wait a while, (2) reset your browser cache, or (3) use a different browser.

How do I get rid of the following error? Warning: Wrong parameter count for preg_replace() in /home/tnjb/public_html/tjrj.net/wp-content/themes/sliding-door/functions.php on line 59"

Sliding Door theme requires PHP version 5.1 or later. E-mail your host provider and ask them what version of PHP they are using. For example, bluehost uses 5.2.

If your provider supports version 5.2 it maybe that is not turned on. You can turn on PHP 5 by one of the following options:1. go to cPanel PHP Configuration and choose PHP5.OR2. Open your .htaccess file and add this line :AddType x-mapp-php5 .php

If all else fails, the earlier versions of my themes did not require PHP version 5. Sliding Door 1.7.2 is available from here, it should work on old versions of php.

Where is Wayne, why don't my questions get answered?

1. The Sliding Door theme works as written and the proof is the thousands of people who have made web pages for a few years with it.

2. When someone goes into the files and changes things they are on their own. It is assumed if someone can change a file they also can reverse or repair what they changed. Please make a backup of the files before you change them, and do one change at a time!

3. If a plug in or wordpress update messes up your site it is probably not a fault with the theme. If you haven't messed with the theme files and you get an error, check out the wordpress.org support page as it's likely a wordpress problem. If the sliding door theme breaks there will be hundreds of posts to this forum about it!

4. The Picture Perfect theme is much less popular and so I haven't really supported it. Only use it if you want to use it as-is or have the skills to edit it.

5. Most answers of these forums come from other users - not me. That's great. If you use the theme, place answer someone else's question who might be a bit behind you. I see my role as (1) Collating the most frequently asked questions here and giving good answers and (2) Answering questions that no one else can answer. I check this site every month or two.

How can I make a donation?

Everything here is free - no need for a donation.

Wayne

COMMENTS FROM OTHER USERS OF THE THEME:

First note: it should be stated somewhere early on that seven pages must be created before the header links will work. I spent a couple hours reading, trying, reading, trying before I finally found a post where someone mentioned that you need to create all seven pages first. dm

Ok, I get that I can use Page Links To for direct links. But all I want to do is have the images link to the categories. Under the old version I could link the images at the top of the page to categories. Now I can't. Where would I put in the url of the categories so the images link to them, not just to a post.

Also, how do I make it so that when I create a new page, it does not automatically put it up on the sliding door images? I don't want to pages linked from the images.

Firstly create 5 or so pages and name them anything so at least you can see your pages, not the default ones that come with the theme.

Now change the pages to point to where you want them to point to.

For example.Let's say you want the first slider to link to category 1, and the heading in the slider to be 'elephants'1. In your web browser, on your website, browse to the category you want. Now select the URL of the category from your browser.It will be something like this:http://yoursite.com/category/category12. Go to the first 'page' and in the page links to section down the bottom paste in this from above url. (http://yoursite.com/category/category1).In the page name, type in 'Elephants'.Now when you click on the first slider, which will be called elephants, it will go to category1.

Let's say you want the second slider to point to a post called 'about me' and you want it to be called 'About'.Go to page 2 in the page edit part of your wordpress admin, call the second page 'About' and in the page links put http://yoursite.com/2009/11/11/about-me/ or whatever the url to the POST is that you want to go to.Now slider 2 will link to that post.

Keep going until you have done all 7 sliders. Note you may choose to have all 7 sliders point to 7 pages, you may choose to have them point to 7 categories, you may choose to have them point to 7 external websites, a comments page, your admin page, anything, and you can mix them all up. That's the beauty of the new version of the theme. And all this without editing any php.

Ok... here's the deal... for the last week my sliding-door header has been perfectly displaying the text and perfectly linking to each page I've created. Take a look at http://ivcjournalism.com

Today, however, the last two windows (5 and 6) of the sliding-door header have no text and will not link to their respective pages (which should be 'IVC Journalism Classes' and 'Contact Us') They were there and functional for the last week and right up until this morning, but not now--about seven hours after this a.m. I DID NOT CHANGE ANYTHING THAT WOULD CREATE THE MISSING TEXT AND LINKS IN THE IMAGEMENU! Not in css or php or any other language.

Does this apply to Picture-Perfect theme as well? Same issue in that the last two are not linking properly nor showing text. I applied this fix and it only reordered what does currently show. I have added pages, as well as went into functions.php and changed the links/text.